Business Commons^™

Drawing upon the results of 26,659 face-to-face interviews in the 27 member states of the

European Union (EU-27), the aim of this paper is to evaluate its varying magnitude and

whether such work is mostly wage-based (of an envelope wage or undeclared variety) or

own-account work (of a market-oriented or solidarity-oriented variety). The finding is

that in ‘welfare capitalist’ work and welfare regimes, which are more equal (measured by

the gini coefficient) pursue more extensive labour market interventions, have higher

levels of social protection and greater state redistribution, undeclared economies are

smaller and are composed mostly of solidarity-oriented own-account work. …

The need to integrate work beyond employment into discussions of labor practices is widely recognized. This has been so far largely achieved by adopting a dual economies perspective, which is criticized for depicting the formal and informal sectors as separate hostile worlds. To resolve this, an alternative “total social organization of labor” approach is here proposed that maintains the terms formal and informal as useful broad descriptors of different work relations, but recognizes a spectrum from purely formal to purely informal labor practices cross-cut by another spectrum from wholly monetized to wholly non-monetized labor practices. Reporting evidence from 861 face-to-face …